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Life is too complex to cover with one song. There’s too much strife, too much anger, too many complex questions and issues. But sometimes some songs fit situations so perfectly.

Sly & The Family Stone have many great songs and albums. … Consider the setting for the early several albums. From 1967 to 1973, you had the rise and fall of flower power, the increasing anger over Vietnam, racial and religious conflicts were skyrocketing, and the political scene was polarizing and chaotic. Does any of that situation sound relevant to today?

Please understand that I’m not suggesting that any song, any music group, any particular album will be the balm to cure any societal ailment. But Sly & The Family Stone’s “Everyday People” is such a great song. And it seems to apply as much now as it did in 1968.

Funkadelic and Boston production duo Soul Clap enjoy a casual Corvette cruise and confront the horrors of unmitigated oil consumption in the surreal live-action/claymation clip for “In Da Kar.”

Recorded during the pair’s 2013 sessions — and featuring a rare appearance from Sly Stone on keys — “In Da Kar” boasts a slick, smooth, understated groove while George Clinton’s voice crackly voice roughens up the edges. It’s an undeniable driving song, and the video fittingly opens with the Soul Clap guys, decked out in flamboyant Seventies-style outfits, pulling up to a gas station in slow motion to refill the tank of their black Corvette.

Sly & The Family Stone’s “Everyday People” was covered on the inaugural episode of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” by Mavis Staples and the show’s house band. Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard, members of Beirut, Buddy Guy, Ben Folds, Aloe Blacc, Derek Trucks, and others were alongside Staples during the cover performance.

That’s what one audience member exclaimed Sunday, Aug. 23 at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank when music icon Sly Stone made an ultra-rare appearance on a concert stage, with no less than the Family Stone, which features several original members of Sly & The Family Stone.

Stone popped up on stage to play keyboards on the band’s hit, “If You Want Me to Stay.”

“It was quite a surprise, a pleasant surprise and it was cool,” said Family Stone member Greg Errico after the show. “I couldn’t see people’s faces in the audience but everybody told me there was a lot of crying going on — it was emotional.”

The White House joined Spotify today, creating daytime and evening playlists featuring some of President Obama’s favorite summer songs. On the daytime playlist — Sly & The Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” Enjoy the full “Day” playlist, featuring Sly & The Family Stone, below!

Back in 1967, when funky trumpeter Cynthia Robinson joined forces with musical visionary Sly Stone, most “girls” in band units wore pretty dresses and harmonized in the background. “I never thought for one second I’d be able to play with a real band,” Robinson recalls via telephone from her home in the Bay Area. “When I was in high school, I went through a lot of bad treatment and was called a lot of names by boys, because I wanted to play. Sly was different.”

Forty-seven later, Cynthia Robinson, who still tours the world playing with the Family Stone, remembers her back in the day life on the road with the musicians she calls, the greatest band in the world.”

In the fall of 1968, Sly and the Family Stone was a confident band worried about its future. Pressured by Epic Records earlier that year to record “Dance to the Music,” a commercial second album, the band pushed back in September with “Life,” which was truer to its freewheeling roots.

To promote the album, Sly and the Family Stone were booked into New York’s Fillmore East on Oct. 4-5. … The band was eager to show Epic that its feel-good, jam-session treatments of gospel-tinged funk-rock originals could whip up any audience. Judging by Sly & The Family Stone – Live At The Fillmore East October 4th & 5th 1968 (Sony Legacy), a four-CD set due July 17, they succeeded.